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What a Beatuiful Game

I am very glad that I waited until 1.04 before buying. Because had I played just the demo I would never have considered purchasing or playing it further. But with 1.04 the FM became just good enough to convince me that I am flying a helicopter--at least when I fly the -500 clone. I come to this sim as a long time addict of flight sims ever since my Atari 1200. Flight Simulator taught me the basics of flight and had me pretty well prepared for the real thing when I started at 16 (a generation ago). Most pilots give up on virtual flight once they start flying in earnest but for some reason I never lost the addiction. There are very few simulators that I have not tried and I am still very active in a few of the current good ones. In the meantime I fly professionally. That and family are positive forces keeping the addiction in check. I mention all this because I get the feeling that ToH is not to be taken seriously compared to the more difficult to master sims that are currently struggling to cling on to an aging and dying market. But this is every bit a simulator. No it doesn't aim to teach startup procedures or Cat A takeoffs but it does feel like what an equivilent helicopter would feel like--and that is far more important than a proper start. Anyway, I quickly played through the career and finished the experience with some mild enthusiasm. I was happy to have bought the game but not sure if it would be something I would come back to again and again. Earlier this week I came across another thread on this forum that explained how to port Arma scenery into ToH. (Apparently this is not yet acceptable to BI nor have 3rd party Arma Mods approved the use of their work outside Arma, so I won't link them here.) Flying over (a fictitious part of Russia) left me stunned--even gobsmacked. In all my years of sim-ing I have wanted to fly over real undulating terrain. This island had it all in amazing detail never before seen in a sim--at least not by me. I spent hours hovering over every hiden pond and landing at every little town doing something else I've never done but always wanted to: get out and explore on foot. This ability to interact in the world in which you fly (other than simply blowing things up) is like the holy grail of flight siming. Of course I have no idea what BI has in store for ToH. My hunch is that the higher fidelity helicopters will somehow find their way to Arma. But whatever the future holds I just want to say kudos to the devs and thanks to BI for bringing a little Arma over to the flight sim market. I really hope this concept works because I have just had one of the coolest experiences in my 25 years of staring at computer screens with a joystick in my hand.

I totally agree. I've played this game for 45 hours now, through all the patches, and I got to say I genuinely love how the light helicopter flies now.
I can't be arsed to play with the medium and heavy because I like to fly low, ducking and dodging trees and powerlines (Chernarus) and finding myself some small roads between the forests where I challenge my flying skills
by following the road below the treetops, hoping to survive!
I have to say that extreme flying became much more difficult with patch 1.04 due to more realistic behaviour under high-stress manouvers, like loss of rpm and power during rapid increases in collective. I find landing smoothly and stationary hovering
to be far simpler now than in previous patches due to more predictable behaviour in ground effect and, more importantly, less pendelum effect while adjusting bank while hovering.

To practice landings and hovering, I fly around landing on any small surface just big enough for the light chopper to land, like small garages. My only real gripe with the game right now is that Seattle is very boring to fly around in, because it's totally flat.
No elevation changes, no mountains, nothing except buildings to make it interesting. Which is why I only fly the Chernarus map from Arma.
On that island I find forrests, elevation-variety, detailed ground-landscape (asphalt, crashable power-lines, interactive buildings) and hundreds of different natural challenges. If the island would just come alive somehow, with traffic, animals, air-traffic, birds and moving people, it would absolutely become perfect.

I hope BIS will realise the potential in an island like Chernarus and include it in a free download/patch with optimized treatment for ToH, because it's rather silly to expect people to cut and paste all kinds of different files between two games to fulfill the potential, especially when the menu's get distorted as a result.
Perhaps it's just me doing it wrong/not including enough of the files, but I just did what a thread told me to do. I tend to think that most people are like me, they just can't be arsed to spend hours reading up on how to add this and that to a game, so I really hope BIS will include different landscapes to the game, or, even better, give us the tools to make our own in a simple manner